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Service remit
The remit of bbc.co.uk is to serve the BBC's public purposes through the provision of innovative and distinctive online content, and through distinctive propositions that reflect and extend the range of the BBC's broadcast services, available to all.
bbc.co.uk should enable the BBC to develop a deeper relationship with licence fee payers and strengthen accountability. It should act as a starting point on the internet from which users can develop their use of the medium and provide a trusted guide to the wider internet.
bbc.co.uk should, at all times, balance the potential for creating public value against the risk of negative market impact.
Delivering the BBC's purposes in 2008/2009
bbc.co.uk will continue to contribute towards the delivery of the BBC's public purposes in the range of ways set out in its service licence. Key developments in the way in which the service will contribute to each purpose are outlined below. Following the service review of bbc.co.uk by the BBC Trust, future investment plans for the service, and some of the developments outlined below, are subject to Trust approval. They are designed to address the priorities identified by the BBC Trust, future-proof the delivery of the purposes, and address perceived gaps in delivery in line with strategies in the BBC's purpose plans.
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Key developments
1 Sustaining citizenship and civil society
Priority: bbc.co.uk will provide rich online support for programming that engages younger audiences with issues of democracy, topical debate and social concerns: for example, Election from CBBC, a new multi-platform series on ecological issues for teenagers from BBC Switch, Born Survivors from BBC Three, and Newsbeat and a new multi-platform series on ecological issues for teenagers from BBC Switch.
We will improve participation and engagement around major political programmes by refreshing the Question Time, Panorama and Today programme websites.
We will encourage media literacy among our younger users through projects such as Kerwhizz, a multi-platform animated quiz format from CBeebies, and via continued investment in developing media creation skills with CBBC's Me And My Movie and Blast! for teenagers.
2 Promoting education and learning
Priority: Subject to approval by the BBC Trust, bbc.co.uk will evolve the portfolio of content in support of the acquisition of skills by school-age children, including a new skill proposition for ages 6–10.
Priority: bbc.co.uk will support a wide range of informal learning via knowledge-building activities around programming, including coverage of the anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, and through the development of permanent online presences for key subject areas. Specifically this year, working with academic bodies around the world, we will launch a new product to enable users to take part in scientific inquiry through surveys and studies and so generate research of genuine and lasting public value.
We will relaunch important knowledge-building programme brands online including Gardeners' World and The Culture Show, which will prepare the ground for a wide range of informal learning products around subjects including cookery, culture and gardening.
bbc.co.uk will offer a video-rich interactive site supporting essential everyday skills for adults, building on the existing RaW literacy campaign and the basic skills sites Skillswise and WebWise.
We will continue to develop Bitesize and Learning Zone Broadband, which support pupils studying for school exams and tests, and provide video clips for the classroom.
We will enrich the BBC's natural history offer by combining programmes, events and user participation to "tell the story of the Earth as it happens", and by supporting World on the Move, a large-scale natural history project on animal migration, with podcasts, featured species profiles, interactive maps and timelines, text clouds and user-generated content.
3 Representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities
Priority: bbc.co.uk will use technology to reflect the diversity of cultural life in the UK. Specifically, we will:– Develop multi-platform propositions that reflect the distinct cultural life of the nations. Dedicated news provision for Scotland will be enhanced, along with content relating to history, music, outdoors, drama and comedy. History and factual content relating to Wales and Northern Ireland will be enriched.– Continue to develop Where I Live sites to offer greater audience interaction around key pan-BBC knowledge-building projects, building on the success of Coast and Springwatch.– Invest in blogs and other ways in which audiences can interact with radio to help stations such as 1Xtra and the Asian Network, helping them provide a range of output to meet the different needs of key UK communities, and to inspire them to interact.– Work with other services to attract teen audiences to high-quality public service content by carrying BBC Switch output.
Priority: Using the Beijing Olympics, the long-term objective is to promote participation in sport through coverage and commitment to minority Olympic sports in the run-up to London 2012. bbc.co.uk will also commission content covering sports and music events for mobile.
bbc.co.uk will deliver Britain From Above – a fresh approach to online documentary in which material from programmes running across BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four will enable users to explore their own country from a new perspective and which will remain available online as a lasting resource.
We will support programming that encourages community participation: for example, for Choir Wars BBC One will use the web and mobile to bring people together each week as 'flashmobs' in different locations across the UK, using BBC Big Screens to create 'people's choirs'.
4 Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence
Priority: bbc.co.uk will increase the impact and richness of the BBC's broadcast ideas by providing an online presence for every programme and through major programme enhancements, including for Radio 4's The Archers and the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. BBC Two's Speak up for Britain will harness the talent of teenage video bloggers to find the most interesting, passionate and exciting voices among the nation's youth.
We will support new creative talent, including via a video-rich online showcase for comedy that will both introduce comedy performers and see established names exploring fresh avenues and taking creative risks.
We will aim to enhance the BBC's commitment to music by enhancing navigation between all music-related output across the BBC and improving BBC Introducing... online to focus more effectively on new and unsigned artists.
bbc.co.uk will encourage creativity among users, particularly teenagers and younger children, supporting them to create their own art, music, film, animation, poetry, dance and games through new initiatives such as Stickers and Game Builder, increasing opportunities to showcase children's content.
5 Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
bbc.co.uk will deliver coverage of the Beijing Olympics, including content enhanced for mobile devices.
We will launch Focus on China, an online portal pulling together content from across the BBC to tell the story of China and its rise as a global power. The project will combine editorial effort with sophisticated aggregation software.
We will support major programming with an international dimension, including online enhancement for the Dr Alice Roberts series on BBC Two uncovering the story of the evolution of the human race from the cradle of civilisation onwards.
6 Delivering the benefit of emerging communications technologies
Priority: We will make bbc.co.uk content more widely available on new platforms through BBC iPlayer and by allowing audiences to 'tear off' BBC content and embed it in other websites. In particular, we will increase the availability of video and audio content on mobile devices.
Priority: We will create a dynamic underlying architecture and a new identity, rating and recommendation system which will form the basis of personalisation on all platforms.
We will aim to improve the user experience of bbc.co.uk, with a new look and feel, website refreshes (including Asian Network, Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live, BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four), a new site for BBC HD and an enhanced mobile browser.
Teenage kicks
BBC Switch is a cross-platform initiative that hopes to capture the elusive 12 to 16-year-old market
Buzz up!
Digg it
Meg Carter
The Guardian, Monday 24 September 2007
Article history
The BBC is pulling out all the stops to win over the 12 to 16-year-old audience with a much anticipated teens strategy which goes live next month.
BBC Switch is a cross-platform initiative, which will use games design, online syndication, social networking and user-generated content. It will span teen-focused content on television, radio and the internet, including a new weekly music show on BBC2.
But it is online content, including a ground-breaking interactive broadband drama called Signs of Life, produced by Big Brother producer Endemol, which the BBC hopes will prove its teen-friendly credentials.
Signs of Life is a thriller set in a fictional Suffolk town with a look and tone inspired by Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Unlike in previous interactive drama, however, viewers won't be able to alter the plot. Instead, they will be encouraged to engage more deeply with content in a variety of ways, such as playing games, completing puzzles, or doing personality tests relating to plot content, the results of which they can post directly on to their own page on MySpace or elsewhere online.
"The aim is to allow viewers to use interactivity to find out more about the drama and themselves," explains Peter Cowley, director of interactive media at Endemol. "It was also important to make this work in the new social networking world where teenagers spend a growing amount of their time. We wanted to make the content something kids would want to talk about with their friends to produce the online equivalent of a water-cooler moment."
Signs of Life goes live on October 14 on www.bbc.co.uk/switch, the BBC's new online portal for teenagers, which will group together for the first time all BBC content of interest to 12 to 16 year-olds, including material relating to Radio 1, 1Xtra, online girls' magazine Slink and EastEnders. New content aired on the site includes Them, a web guide to the UK's teen "tribes", comprising BBC-produced short films about its viewers' lives. Although made available online, much of this content was created for multi-platform use - the only option as not only are today's teens spending more time with new media, they spend more time consuming a number of different media at once.
"The centre of gravity for this new strategy is the web because you've got to go where the audience is," says Parfitt, who was given the task of coming up with a teen strategy by BBC director general Mark Thompson in June 2006. "Online also allows us to more coherently link together the bits of teen content we were already doing. However, it was also important not to fall into the trap of thinking all today's teens are totally 'technologied-up'. That's why extending the BBC Switch brand on to BBC2 and Radio 1 is so important."
So from October 20, 12 to 16 year-olds will be able to tune into their very own teen-focused hour on BBC2 late on Saturday afternoons. This will comprise a new weekly half-hour music show called Sound, co-hosted by Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac and newcomer Nick Grimshaw, featuring the best new UK music filmed at outside locations across the country. The rest of the hour will be filled by Falcon Beach, a Canadian-produced, coming-of-age drama, and selected highlights from Them and Signs of Life.
BBC Switch goes live on Radio 1, meanwhile, a week earlier. A five-hour teen slot will air on Sunday nights from October 14 with Annie Mac hosting a new show, Switch with Annie Mac, from 7pm to 10pm, and Kelly Osbourne hosting Radio 1's Surgery, from 10pm to midnight.
Parfitt claims the new strategy is underpinned by the most in-depth study yet of British teenagers. Conducted for the BBC by research consultancy Sparkler, the research explored the interests and attitudes of 200 teenagers from across the UK through one-to-one interviews, focus groups, and video and written diaries.
"When we started work on this, Top of the Pops had just been dropped. What teen-focused content there was was sporadic. And little serious audience insight work had been done because 12 to 16-year-olds are not a particularly commercially valuable audience," he says. "We identified a clear set of needs that the BBC could better serve. One of the most important of these was to break away from negative stereotypes that are so readily applied to this age group, and let them present themselves in a positive way."
Such insights have shaped the content which Parfitt and his team have commissioned so far. Live performances by bands appearing in Sound, for example, don't take place in a studio but in local parks before an audience of teenage passers-by. The research also informed Parfitt's selection of the team of a dozen or so college-leavers he recruited to develop BBC Switch online.
"When launching 1Xtra five years ago we knew it was essential to find an authentic workforce close to the centre of gravity of the audience we wanted to reach, and the same thing was key to getting the right proposition for the 12 to 16-year-old audience," he says.
Parfitt hopes this grassroots approach will set BBC Switch apart from the teen content that is already offered by other broadcasters. Some observers, however, are unconvinced. When Thompson announced the teen strategy plan last year, a number of the BBC's commercial rivals criticised it as yet another land grab by the publicly funded broadcaster. "The question is whether duplicating what is already available to this audience is really public service," one independent production company executive observes. "Teens are already well-served when you consider what's being done by Channel 4, E4 and Trouble."
Yet the BBC is clearly under pressure to boost its teen appeal in the face of growing competition from iPods, mobile phones and online entertainment services such as MySpace and Bebo. In its annual report published in July, the BBC Trust highlighted the challenge Radio 1 faces to reach 15 to 29-year-olds, with the station's reach - the number of people tuning in for at least 15 minutes a week - among this age group down for the second year running. More recently, BBC3 hired executive editor Karl Warner to boost its teenage audience.
Parfitt remains unperturbed, however. "There is an audience there to be served," he says. "This will be a slow-burn campaign, and rightly so, as we prove our credentials over time."
3 comments:
The BBC is trying to aim for all ages. They have made certain programs which are aimed at a particular age group. By the different programs they are able to represent different age groups in different ways.
Cbeebies and CBBC is for the younger audience.
They have also made programs such as wild life programs and programs on the earth for the adult audience.
The BBC has also made their programs so that it shows and represents the cultural diversity in the UK and have also made educational programs so that it represents variety.
The BBC have also tried to get teenagers more involved with them but making a website called BBC switch. Here Teenagers are able listen to music, play games, go onto socializing websites and do other things which teenagers like to do. This website is mainly aimed at them as it is things that they would be more interested in then anyone else.
Also as Teenagers are more likely to use the internet so it is easier for the BBC to reach this audience because of this website.
By the BBC having all of these different programs, websites and radio shows they are able to reach each target audience in there own way.
The BBC are not representing teenagers in a bad way but in a more positive way. This is because to be able to reach this particular audience you can't approach them in a bad way.
The BBC are now having problems reaching the teenage audience with all the different competitors.The BBC now have to think of other ways to reach their target audience.
BBC as an institution portrays itself as a universal company that are able to reach a wide range and variety of audiences.
Moreover, in order to achieve a wider audiences, one scheme of BBC is to provide varieties of choices to the viewers through the different shows they offer, in relation to each sister channels.
Wherein BBC one specialises on news and current affairs; BBC two is more of entertainment and variety shows; BBc three shows were concentrated more of reality, fashion and glamorous shows.
These alone, achieved an audience of more likely adults. For kids and children, BBc offers Cbeebies and CCBC,which offers animes/cartoon characters that offers the idea of fantasy and reality.
However, BBC never stops reinventing themselves, specially in targetting the young adults or also known as the teenagers of this generation.
Almost 65% of UK's demographic data, is composed of teens/young adults. Basing in this statistics, this is one reason why BBC targets them as their viewers.
In oreder to attain this, BBC have launched BBC Switch, that specifically targets 12-16/15-29(teenagers).
BBC Switch is divided into three main parts namely: television, radio and e-media/internet.
Basing on these choices, teenagers were represented as innovative and always up to date in everything. Innovative enough,that they cope to the trends that technology offers.
Like for example, BBC switch online/web page is already connected to Bebo, My space and facebook. These links are one form of media communication,which is to provide interaction among people. And this is specifically designed for teens, who are known as the "youtube" generation.
It also offers games on line and repeats of the shows,for viewers who did not wtch or miss some of the shows.
According to the survey 25% more likely to be online than the general population and spent 24% more time online than the average Internet user in April 2007. This demonstrates how integral internet to their lives and almost become a trend to the teens.
For television, the shows which includes Sound that focuses on new music live performances and interviews. This alone portrays the teens as music lovers and in the beat of music. Also, there were documentary entitled Revealed that shows the lives of teens in UK. This alone, provides an educational and self learning to the target audiences.
Again this is one of the response of BBC station on its responsibility as a Public Service Broadcaster(PSB).
BBC projected diversification through multi-platforms,combining television, radio and e-media.
However,they also used this as a means of fulfilling their duty to the public through providing options,choices and other modes of interaction.
Specifically, concentrating on Teens and their representations in the society.
BBC switch is aimed to attract a wider audience for the bbc. The programmes shown on this are targetd to diffrent people and ages groups, so the channel will get more viewers.
BBC switch is aimed at tenneagers, whereas cbeebies is aimed at a younger audience. Then docmentires and wild life programmes are shown for teh adults on bbc two.
One reason why BBC targets teenagers as their viewers is beacuse around 65% of UK's demographic data, is composed of teens/young adults.
BBC Switch is divided into three main platforms : television, radio and e-media/internet.
therefore teeanges can get more inteactive with the programme through the internet, as teenagers are known as the "youtube" generation.
It also offers games online and repeats of the shows,for viewers who missed it, or want to see it again.
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